The International Marine Conservation Congress is the most important international meetings for marine conservation professionals and students. This blog is for IMCC5, held June 2018 in Kuching, Malaysia.

Pages

Marine Conservation Institute is excited for the Society for Conservation Biology’s fourth annual International Marine Conservation Congress. This year we will be hosting a Focus Group on August 4 to develop robust criteria for the Global Ocean Refuge System and would like to invite all interested Congress attendees to pre-register for this day-long session.

The Global Ocean Refuge System (GLORES) is a science based initiative designed to catalyze strong protection for 30% of the ecosystems in each marine biogeographic region of the world’s oceans by 2030. It is a strategic way to safeguard marine ecosystems and will enable humans to recover marine life. Protecting places where viable marine populations can survive is the most cost-effective tool for conserving marine life. Effective, strongly protected areas will maintain and recover living things whose interactions drive humankind’s largest life life-support system, and provide a strategic protein reserve for the future. Marine Conservation Institute is working with a growing circle of partners to create the Global Ocean Refuge System, a new strategy to incentivize humans to provide safe havens for marine life as climate changes and oceans acidify.

At IMCC3 in Glasgow, we hosted a workshop and presented a conceptual framework for scoring Global Ocean Refuges based on the scientific literature. We have refined these criteria and will be presenting a more detailed scoring framework for Global Ocean Refuges and a preliminary Marine Protected Area nomination survey to the IMCC4 participants in St. Johns, Newfoundland and seek their feedback.

Picture: GLORES workshop participants at IMCC3 in Glasgow.

Nominate a site to the Global Ocean Refuge System!

Even if you can’t participate in the Focus Group, we would like to request that you nominate a site to the Global Ocean Refuge System via our new survey platform prior to the Congress: https://globaloceanrefuge.org/nominate/. We will use pre-nominated MPAs and the outcome of their internal vetting as a basis for the Focus Group discussion. This workshop will provide marine conservation biologists the opportunity to help shape a conservation strategy based on their science – allowing them the opportunity to make their science matter. Please join us!